“The perfect palate-cleansing treat at the end of a long, strange, adverse-selection-y week. The video below will give you the background you need; from there your best bet is to skip the news stories about this and dive straight into the social-media photo chronicles of Miles’s big day instead. The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, and John Sexton at Breitbart all have round-ups; the San Francisco Chronicle even liveblogged it, culminating in the little guy being presented with the key to the city.” Feel good story of the day: Batkid saves San Francisco

“Business leaders in the city are scratching their heads over recent remarks by Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio. Describing how he plans to govern once he takes office next year, the mayor-elect declared flatly that he doesn’t believe in the free-market system. At least Comrade Bill was being honest. “Everything you heard about me is true. . . I am not a free-marketeer. . . I believe in the heavy hand of government,” de Blasio stated matter-of-factly during an hour-long presentation to some of the city’s biggest real-estate developers.” De Blasio vs. the market

Our kids and their kids are going to have NO FUTURE if we don’t stop what we’re doing. “Right now, our pro-geriatric and pro-middle age policy biases hit twenty-somethings hard. As cities and states shift spending from providing services today to paying pensions to yesterday’s workers, the twenty-somethings take it on the chin. There are fewer city and state jobs for them to compete for, and the services they rely on are being cut to the bone. Often with the support of labor leaders, when wages and benefits are slashed, young workers eat all the cuts while older workers get to keep their current salaries and retirement benefits. Obamacare represents yet another mass subsidy of the middle aged by the young, with a marked transfer of income from young men to middle aged women. Skyrocketing tuition saddles young people with heavy loan payments at the time of life when their incomes are lowest.” Life After Blue: America Needs To Stop Eating Its Young

“Whether it’s a deliberate attempt to change history by lying about it — as the Soviets did — or just denying the cause and effect of a particular philosophy with “adolescent abandon,” as Jones appears to do in his BBC appearance, the revision of history by the Left deserves our laser-focused attention. When leftists dismiss facts and truth as cavalierly as they do, freedom-loving (and truth-loving) people should stand up and expose them.” Rehabbing Karl Marx Yet Again

“After a spate of news stories this summer citing tensions between President Barack Obama and his top military commanders over the possibility of U.S. intervention in Syria, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough hastened to assure the Washington Post that everything was, in fact, copacetic: The president “appreciates” candid military advice “above all else,” McDonough insisted, and has “close, and in some instances warm, relationships with his military chiefs,” as the Post put it. During my own time at the Pentagon, where I worked as an Obama appointee from the spring of 2009 until mid-2011, few seemed to hold this view. I recall asking one general, recently back from Afghanistan, if he’d shared his experiences and insights with the president. Rolling his eyes, he told me grimly that the White House preferred the military to be seen but not heard.” Obama vs. the Generals

Insanity squared. “And yet, there it is — a report that the State Department hopes to woo Russia by answering the Kremlin’s insults and power-and-influence grabs with an invitation to come on in and set up GPS monitor stations for Roscosmos on U.S. soil; never mind the worries of the CIA and Defense Department.” Department of Peace for Our Time

“The goals of healthcare reform were never centered on the customers. The objective was to increase the size of government, and increase the amount of leverage the government has over the nation’s healthcare system. Cutting costs, making things efficient, and insuring more people was a fake goal in order to get people to buy in.” Repeal Obamacare

This from Steve Tobak, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultant and former senior executive of the technology industry. “Let me tell you something, folks. We’ve seen this sort of leadership behavior before. We’ve seen it at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and Adelphia. If you’ve ever wondered what makes powerful executives commit fraud, the answer is simple. They think they’re above the truth and the law. They think they know better. And they think they can exert their will over others without being held to account.” Lies, Damn Lies and ObamaCare

“Insurance companies and commissioners aren’t the only ones getting an immense headache from this “fix.” In the White House also people are coming to grips with the huge mess created by the President’s desperate maneuver, and in the Beltway wonks are panicking. The American health and insurance system, badly flawed as it is, is as complex a web of interests and institutions as you will find. It can’t be uprooted and overturned by casual comments and presidential decrees—not without serious side effects.” Obama’s ACA “Fix” Stuns DC, Nation

“It’s tempting to draw a line from the White House to the D.C. mayor’s office and speculate on why Mr. White was good enough to perform his duties on Thursday but not on Friday after making a statement questioning the Obamacare fix offered by the president. It seems rather sudden, doesn’t it?” D.C. Insurance Commission Fired for Questioning Obamacare ‘Fix’

“Hours after President Obama stumbled through his retreat on ObamaCare last week, a liberal friend was telling me how disappointed she is in him. The insurance debacle, she said with resignation, was the final straw and led her to conclude he lacks the right stuff to be a good president. “It’s so discouraging,” she sighed. “I give up.”” The wheels have fallen off the Obama bandwagon

“Forgive the personal reference, but from the very beginning of Mr. Obama’s astonishing rise, I felt that I was witnessing something old and familiar. My advantage owed nothing to any mastery of American political history. I was guided by my immersion in the political history of the Arab world and of a life studying Third World societies.” When the Obama Magic Died

“The president of the United States doesn’t even get a line-item veto on budget laws. So he certainly can’t legally rewrite the ObamaCare statute. A political meltdown is mutating into a constitutional crisis. Imagine if a Republican president decided unilaterally to “do everything we can to fix” abortion law. What if he decided he must reinterpret the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling that “prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician”?” ObamaCare “Fix” Is An Attempt At Spaying Constitution

“How many Democrats made the promise? There’s no comprehensive list of all of them, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office has compiled a list of 27 Democratic senators who pledged that Americans could keep their coverage under Obamacare. The list includes the entire Democratic leadership in the Senate as well as Democrats facing tough re-election races in 2014, like Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich, and Kay Hagan. Here is that list, compiled by McConnell’s office.” 27 Democratic senators who promised you could keep your health coverage

“But it won’t actually solve the problem for millions of Americans who are losing their current coverage as Obamacare deadlines loom. Instead, Obama’s announcement is a desperate attempt to solve his own political problems by shifting blame.” Obama’s blame-shifting strategy won’t work

“This has become a much-used page in President Obama’s playbook. During his reelection campaign, in a clear attempt to court Hispanic voters, the president directed the Department of Homeland Security not to initiate deportation proceedings against certain illegal aliens — the country’s chief law-enforcement officer ordering, in essence, the department not to enforce the law. Last summer, perhaps recognizing the enormous implementation problems that were to come or the negative effect on the stubbornly soft jobs market, or else seizing the opportunity to steer more people into the government-run exchanges (or perhaps all three), he delayed for one year the ACA’s mandate for employers with at least 50 employees to provide health insurance to their employees by January 1, 2014. He also has made recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess (which have since been struck down by three appellate courts) and attempted to implement gun-control measures that had no hope of being enacted legislatively.” The Unlawful Delay

“By our count at the Galen Institute, more than 27 significant changes already have been made to Obamacare: at least 10 that President Obama has made unilaterally, 15 that Congress has passed and the president has signed, and 2 by the Supreme Court. But even this large number of changes hasn’t stopped the cascade of failures we are seeing today.” Twenty-Seven Obamacare Changes

We’ve got a terrific line up for our annual Christmas program. First up will be the Ignite Barbershop Quartet. Ignite began singing together after a quartet matching party in November 2015. They are all Champion members of Region 21’s Scottsdale Chorus and they will be singing for us!

After lunch, Congressional District 6 congressman, Representative David Schweikart, will talk to us about what’s happening in Washington DC, and provide us with a status of the Tax Bill working its way through the House of Representatives and Senate.

Finally, member Julia Graham will install our new 2018/2019 officers. We look forward to seeing you and be sure to bring a friend or two or three!